Bryan Mitchell was near the end of a tour as a Naval Reservist in Afghanistan in the fall of 2013 when he checked the news back home. First, he searched for the weekend NFL scores, where the Avon Lake, Ohio, native saw that his hometown Cleveland Browns had lost again. Then he clicked a link about a successful crowdfunding campaign.
The stories had nothing in common, but they sparked an idea: What if he used a similar crowdfunding effort to try to buy his favorite football team? He even had a name for the campaign: “Billion Dollar Browns.”
Mitchell lived through the Browns’ relocation to Baltimore in 1995, and he’s remained true to the brown-and-orange since it returned in 1999, no matter the franchise’s lack of success since then. He said he’s not upset with the team’s current owner, Jimmy Haslam. But he is tired of the bad luck Browns, and he hates the thought of his 10-year-old son living and dying with a team that “right now has some bad DNA,” he said.
So this week, two years after the thought first popped into his head, Mitchell, a 37-year-old former journalist who now works as a corporate communications consultant in Indiana, finally put his plan into action. He launched Billion Dollar Browns on GoFundMe, the popular crowdfunding site, with the goal of raising $1 billion to buy Cleveland’s beleaguered football franchise and put fans like him in charge, just as they are in Green Bay, where the Packers are the only publicly owned franchise in major American sports.
“Players come and go, coaches come and go, this team has come and gone,” Mitchell said. “The only thing that remains are the fans.”
The idea is simple. Instead of operating in a manner that maximizes revenues first, as many single-owner clubs do, the primary aim of fan-owned clubs, at least in theory, is to win. Fans, after all, don’t care much about how rich their team is if it can’t muster any success on the field.
It’s a model economists, sports fans and even erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich have touted.
“I really believe in what it means for fans to own the team, and to have the people of Cleveland driving the direction of the team,” Mitchell said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if it was run not for the profit of a single owner, but for fans?”
““Players come and go, coaches come and go, this team has come and gone. The only thing that remains are the fans.””
It’s an ambitious dream. Through GoFundMe, Mitchell wants a million fans to contribute $1 each toward an initial $1 million, with the stipulation that they will donate $1,000 each should he reach that goal. Then he’ll put the stake in hands of financial and legal advisers before he takes an offer to Haslam, the club and the NFL.
If they bought the team, the shareholding fans would elect a 13-member board that would choose the team’s general manager. The finances would be transparent, and shares wouldn’t pay dividends. They wouldn’t accept public funding for a stadium, and the focus would remain solely on bringing winning football to Cleveland.
The effort garnered instant attention from local news stations, and by Friday afternoon, the campaign that Mitchell plans to run through the entire NFL season had raised $245 from 22 different contributors. (If he doesn’t reach his goal, Mitchell said he’ll donate the money he gets to Cleveland-area charities.)
Mitchell, like any NFL fan, is familiar with the Packers, whose shareholders gather once a year to vote on franchise-related issues and elect a board of directors. He was inspired too by three years in England, where a local soccer club, Ipswich Town, was owned by shareholder-fans until an English businessman bought them out in 2007.
Fan-owned teams are more common in European sports. Spanish soccer giants Real Madrid and F.C. Barcelona -- the two most valuable franchises in the world -- are owned by supporters. German regulations require that fans own a majority stake in pro sports clubs.
In the U.S., though, Mitchell’s dream faces an uphill climb that borders, perhaps, on impossible. The Browns are worth $1.12 billion, Forbes estimates, and even if Mitchell and likeminded fans could raise that, they would surely face stiff resistance from the NFL, which no longer allows Packers-style ownership under its bylaws (Green Bay was grandfathered in). NFL owners aren’t likely to cede control of another franchise to fans whose first interest isn’t the next dollar.
But this isn’t a joke or a publicity stunt, Mitchell insists. He is serious, and if he and the small group already aligned with him -- he has help from one lawyer friend and another who is handling digital outreach -- can actually raise $1 billion, he believes the NFL will have no choice but to listen.
“The NFL would have to look,” he said. “If fans can raise $1 billion, they’d have to acknowledge our passion.”
Look at the team he’s talking about, and it starts to make sense. This is a franchise that an owner once ripped away from Cleveland, that has had 21 starting quarterbacks, eight head coaches, two ownership groups and zero playoff wins since it returned in 1999. Its own fans have called it a “factory of sadness.”
“If fans own the team,” Mitchell said, “it could be a break from the past.”